What is PVP (Plant Variety Protection)?
With an aim to provide and promote an effective system of plant
variety protection, encouraging the development of new varieties of plants for
the benefit of society, this is what Plant Variety Protection generally is. But
to be more specific and precise it is a protection provided to the developers
and breeders to have the patent right to the new variety introduced by them.
The tenure might vary from trees to plants and seeds, where trees have a longer
duration of possession than the other two. As plant breeding is long and
expensive but plant varieties can be easily and quickly reproduced therefore
the breeders need protection to recover investment, thus these plant variety
protection act would allow the breeders or developers to be certified producers
and growers of the new variety for a certain time period.
The Plant Patent Act was enacted by US congress in 1930. It was
introduced primarily to benefit the horticulture industry by encouraging plant
breeding and increasing plant genetic diversity. Plant patents encompass newly
found plant varieties as well as cultivated spores, mutants, hybrids and newly
found seedlings on the proviso that they reproduce asexually. Asexual
reproduction is defined as any reproductive process that does not involve the
union of individuals or germ cells. It is the propagation of a plant to
multiply the plant without the use of genetic seeds. Modes of asexual
reproduction in plants include grafting, bulbs, apomictic seeds, rhizomes and
tissue culture.
The Plant Variety Protection (PVP) Act was enacted on December 24,
1970. Its purpose is to "encourage the development of novel varieties of
sexually reproduced plants" by providing their owners with exclusive
marketing rights of them in the United States. The requirements of protection
are that the variety be uniform, stable, and distinct from all other varieties.
Fungi, bacteria, and first generation hybrids are excluded from PVP protection.
Varieties sold or used in the United States for longer than 1 year or more than
4 years in a foreign country are also ineligible for protection.
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